Uh, you can absolutely be pollution neutral. You can be carbon neutral, and I don't buy for one microsecond that there are 0 technologies that could filter soot from smokestacks. In fact, we could recapture all of it.
If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).
Some reading: https://www.ehn.org/dupont-c8-parkersburg-2644262065.html
You said “pollution” should be banned. That includes a whole lot more than soot. And no, you can’t recapture “all” of the soot from a smokestack. Filtering particulates out of flue-gas stacks is a whole field of engineering. And that’s just one source. PM2.5 is produced by a huge variety of human activity: https://www.pca.state.mn.us/air/sources-air-pollution-most-i.... The dominant source is actually residential wood burning.
> If you read about the history of pollution, you'll see that the "informed tradeoffs" is a complete fairy-tale. It's mostly ignorance and abuse of the poor by the wealthy (who put polluting factories in poor areas like West Virginia).
I focused on environmental policy in law school. It is absolutely about informed trade-offs, within an economic framework. Equity is one part of policy, but the field is not “mostly” about that. Of course that aspect of it gets a lot of press, because it makes for easy narratives for liberal arts major journalists who have trouble with science and economics.
The laws of physics are irrelevant, we already have the technology to accomplish most of what we need. And regarding the laws of economics, we are in a period of record low inflation (according to the fed) despite record low interest rates. As such, this would be a prefect time to make the transition to clean tech. There is tons of capital floating around desperately seeking returns, and a little inflation would be very welcome right now.
You can’t do anything without generating pollution. None of the things that enable this interaction on HN exist without pollution.
> There is no reason the broader population should have to suffer from the externalities of profit seeking companies.
Sure—the reason is that nearly everyone uses the things that are produced as a byproduct of this pollution. And these industries are highly competitive. Just as rising prices of crude oil quickly get passed along to consumers, so do the rising costs of environments compliance. Rising environmental standards also accelerate the exodus of manufacturing jobs to places like China with less stringent regulations.
> What other countries are doing in this regard is irrelevant. The U.S. is largely considered the leader of the free world. We need to start acting like it and set examples the rest of the world can follow.
Governance isn’t an exercise in moral posturing. It’s about making various trade-odds in a finite world governed by brutal laws of physics and economics. When you increase pollution standards, you save some lives, but increase people’s cost of living, and push more jobs to China. How other countries make these trade-offs is highly relevant.